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Hyperloop Update: Elon Musk Will Start Developing It Himself

Elon Musk just finished a phone call with reporters explaining a little more about his Hyperloop idea. Before the call he posted the link to a 57-page outline describing what it might entail. You can read the whole thing here.

Here are a few other things Musk mentioned and clarified while on the call:

- The plans Musk unveiled were developed by a team of a dozen engineers from both Tesla and SpaceX. They spent roughly nine months developing them, though Musk started thinking about a Hyperloop concept about two years ago. “It was very much a background task—it was not anybody’s full-time job,” he said. “We were just batting it around in the background at SpaceX and Tesla and then in the last few weeks we ended up allocating some full-time days to it.”

- The Hyperloop sits in a tube system, rather than previously speculated underground tunnels or rails.

- The electromagnetic tubes will run mostly along the I-5 corridor, with exceptions around the densest areas in Los Angeles and San Francisco. “There is a tricky portion near LA which is called the grapevine,” Musk said, so he would make a “series of tunnels through the hills – they’re not very long tunnels”—to help navigate passengers to the correct station. The passenger pods “end up essentially chasing the pulse,” he said.

- The Hyperloop is optimized for travel between cities that are fewer than 1,000 miles apart. “The Hyperloop (or something similar) is, in my opinion, the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart,” Musk wrote in the report. “Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper… For much longer journeys such as LA to NY it would be worth exploring super high speeds and this is probably technically feasible, but, as mentioned above, I believe the economics would probably favor a supersonic plane.”

- The Hyperloop will travel 800 miles per hour–and in every way feel more like the Concorde than an Amtrak car. “Trains are heavy,” he says. “This is designed more like an aircraft.”

- In theory, the Hyperloop will be safer than a plane or train. “Obviously never is a rather strong word, but it would just be extremely difficult I suppose to crash,” Musk said. “It’s not like it’s going to fall out of the sky, essentially, nor can it be derailed as a train can.”

- Same goes for earthquake hazards: “The thought I had was actually in the pylons where the tube is mounted to have earthquake dampers, the sort of things you have in buildings in California, basically shock absorbers…. There’s going to be potentially some earthquake that is so gigantic that it overcomes the dampers but we have that same problem with buildings, too. So relative to say a train where you can’t really do that with tracks it should be quite a bit safer.”

- The Hyperloop will use some of the same technology that is found in the battery packs of the Tesla Model S. “It’s a linear electric induction motor, the same as what is in the Model S. This is a pretty longstanding technology: The linear electric induction motor was essentially invented by [inventor Nikola] Tesla back in the day.”

- Musk will build a demonstration prototype himself. “I think it might help if I built a demonstration article. I think I probably will do that, actually. I’ve sort of come around in my thinking on that part.”

- The Hyperloop will feel like an airplane to ride. “There will be initial acceleration and once you’re at traveling speed you wouldn’t really notice the speed at all,” Musk said, noting that there will be no lateral acceleration (by which he means swaying side-to-side like a roller coaster). “It should just feel really super smooth and quiet, and obviously there wouldn’t be any turbulence or anything.”

- It’ll take roughly seven years before we can ride in it.

- For now, this is a low priority for Musk. “Maybe I would just do the beginning bit, create a subscale version that is operating and then hand it over to someone else. Ironing out the details at a subscale level is a tricky thing. I think I would probably end up doing that. It just won’t be immediate in the short term because I have to focus on Tesla and SpaceX execution.”

- If it was his first priority, he could have it done in a year. “The demonstration project would not be anything that required some sort of big government approval process,” he said.

- The $70 billion “high-speed” rail system proposed for California’s coastal corridor prompted Musk to act. “I don’t think we should do the high-speed rail thing because it’s currently slated to be roughly $70 billion but if one ratio is the cost at approval time versus the cost at completion time of most large projects I think it’s probably going to be close to $100 billion. And it seems like it’s going to be less desirable to take that than to take a plane, so that means it’s not just going to be, I mean California taxpayers are not just going to have to write off $100 billion but they’re also going to have to maintain and subsidize the ongoing operation of this train for a super long time, sort of California’s Amtrak. And that just doesn’t seem wise for a state that was facing bankruptcy not that long ago.”

- The Hyperloop will cost closer to $6 billion to build. “That’s about the right number,” Musk says. “It’s worth noting that that’s more than Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City have spent, combined.”

- Musk will invest his own money into this project, even though he hopes others will help as well. “I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.”

- But it’s okay if it doesn’t make him a lot of money. “I’m not trying to make a ton of money on this but I would like to see it come to fruition,” he said. “I don’t really care much one way or another if I have any economic benefit or another, but it would be cool to see an alternate form of transport.”

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This will cost more than California’s high-speed rail, as it doesn’t solve any of the land-use rights that high-speed rail is going through.

The expensive part isn’t the tracks or the trains. The expensive part is buying the land.

It’s laughable that he thinks he can buy the land for $1 billion. That’s going to go maybe 100 yards when he tries to buy land rights into San Francisco the way California High-Speed Rail is actually going to do.

Sorry Elon, but this is a property rights problem, not an engineering problem.

Additionally, rail is STILL a better engineering option than HyperLoop, as it’s more robust, efficient, and cheaper.

You should read his paper as I got his $1 billion land use number directly from it.

Read his paper, because everything in it is basically false.

He’s a car salesman that prefers government pay for roads to fund his car sales business.

He’s pissed off that government is paying for high-speed rail that would hurt his car sales business, and so he is making up a separate system for noobs that don’t know anything about civil engineering and thinks land use rights can be bought for $1 billion.

This represents the worst of geek culture, where geeks tend to latch onto a small idea without an understanding of systematic problems.

The California High-Speed Rail system is a REAL solution, where every little detail has been solved, with a pricetag that is realistic.

Real engineers know real systems design. Elon Musk doesn’t, as he has a very limited vision of the system. He’s one of those people that thinks the roads come for free and that government doesn’t fund his engineer’s educational training.

*Sigh* OK. If you read his paper, then explain why $1 billion land use is laughable since the majority of the land along the I-5 is already public and he only needs to buy bits and pieces near the cities.

In the conference call, he stated that the paper was worked on by him and two teams of engineers from SpaceX and Tesla. Are you saying SpaceX’s and Tesla’s engineers aren’t real engineers?

Well, I *AM* a real systems design engineer, and I know enough to tell that you don’t have any clue. I can also tell that you despise the profit motive, even though Musk isn’t relying on one for this proposal.

Granted, Musk’s proposal is lacking a great deal of fill-in detail … but that’s the difference between what architects (Musk) develop (plans with proof-of-concept calculations) and what engineers develop (all those pesky details).